Edward Dolnick

Since the beginning of time, people have wondered how new life comes into the world. How does sex lead to babies? How does a baby “know how” to turn into an adult?

This fascinating and very fun book is about the long quest to understand how reproduction and growth happen, especially in the years before the invention of the microscope and the discovery of genetics and DNA. But it could be subtitled “How the Persistence of Misogyny and Religion Warped Science and Impeded Scientific show more Advancement for Literally Thousands of Years” and could serve as a case study in epistemology.

From the time of the Enlightenment, there has been the assumption (and more strongly, assertion) that science was grounded in observations and experimental data. But in fact, observers don’t operate in a vacuum; rather, the very questions they ask, the language they use, and the sense they impart to what they see is determined by the sociopolitical environment in which they live, helping to shape their understanding. Knowledge thus rests upon social and historical conditions from which escape is often difficult if not impossible, because, in part, such a supporting framework is invisible.

Moreover, as Erich Fromm argued in Escape From Freedom, “the influence of any doctrine or idea depends on the extent to which it appeals to psychic needs in the character structure of those to whom it is addressed.” (p. 83)

As for gender bias and the resultant devaluing of women’s importance, it has long influenced scientific inquiry. Until relatively recently, scientists studying the question of “where do babies come from” were convinced that women were inferior, or mutilated men. They could not even conceive [sic] of a significant role for women in creating life. Since their conceptual lenses were thus shaded with bias, they fit what they could see into a Procrustean bed which ensured men played a dominant role in such an important process.

The greatly influential Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC), for example, believed that it was male sperm that caused the development of an embryo in the female uterus. According to this theory, the male produces a ‘seed' which forms an ‘egg' when mixed with menstrual blood (the ‘soil’). The ‘egg’ then develops into a fetus inside the mother according to the information contained within the male 'seed’ alone. That theory survived for some 2000 years, with only slight modifications. (It was Aristotle who promulgated the idea that females were just “mutilated males.”) After all, the role that semen played was more evident than women’s role in the process. Wasn't she just the field into which the seed was sown? (But then, why did so many babies resemble their mothers?)

Religious concerns and beliefs have also muddied the waters. How could new life develop without the active involvement of a designer?

As Dolnick tells the story, the main theories about reproduction reflected both gender and religious prejudices. They were split between the belief in and search for a seminal [sic] role for semen from men, or a mysterious (but invisible) egg in the female. (Such theorists were known as either “spermists” or “ovists.”)

A popular argument, informed by religious beliefs, was one Dolnick calls the “Russian Nesting Dolls” theory, or more formally, preformationism - i.e., the idea that God (who, the Bible said, created all of life in seven days) put tiny versions of all human bodies for all time into the semen, and these got passed on through the generations until that human’s time had come. That had to be a lot of semen! [And if actual lives were part of semen, how could God let so many of them be eliminated when, for example, semen was spilled out through masturbation? Indeed, this widespread practice aroused (sic) religious wrath in part because it did seem to involve the killing of potential human beings.]

The growth of beings was another conundrum. Something had to be providing a template, and DNA was totally beyond the imagination of pre-20th Century scientists. No one even thought to look for a mechanism by which such a process could occur at least until Darwin.

Some came close, like the Dutch microbiologist, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, but as Dolnick laments, he “was done in by ideological blinders,” mainly related to gender bias. Nevertheless, his pioneering work with microscopy led the way for others to see the smaller elements that are involved in conception.

Lazzaro Spallanzani, an Italian Catholic priest and biologist (1729-1799) came close with his meticulous experiments. Most notably, he crafted “boxer shorts” for frogs to see if pregnancy could result if no sperm were released by the male frogs. (It could not, of course.) Still, the truth eluded scientists who could not see anything smaller than the “little animals” (spermatozoa) they took for parasites.

The biggest breakthrough prior to the discovery of DNA did not take place until 1876. Oscar Hertwig (1849-1922) was a German biologist working in Naples, Italy who studied sea urchins, inter alia. The beauty of studying sea urchins, as Dolnick reports, is not only that fertilization takes place outside of the body where the process is visible, but that sea urchin eggs are transparent. Thus, Hertwig could actually see that fertilization occurred when a single sperm penetrated an egg and their nuclei fused. He even speculated that something in the nuclei of these reproductive cells passed on hereditary characteristics. (It was 1944 before experiments demonstrated that the substance responsible for biological inheritance is a nucleic acid, DNA.)

The book ends with the discoveries of Hertwig - the question of where babies come from had pretty much been answered. Dolnick concludes on a wry note:

“We think there is something magical about getting a rabbit out of a hat, the writer John Stewart Collis once observed. Not so. The real magic is getting a rabbit out of a rabbit.”

Evaluation: I thoroughly enjoyed this exploration of how people came to understand the most basic question about existence: how does it even happen? As Dolnick points out, if you think about it, in a time when you had no technological tools to see inside the body, and knew nothing about the mechanism of inheritance, how would you make sense of it all? His tour through the history of theories, false starts, and stabs at answers, is wonderfully entertaining. show less

An entertaining and fast-moving historical narrative of the scientific revolution, including fascinating insights into the lives of luminaries such as Isaac Newton, Leibniz, Galileo, Johannes Kepler, and more.

There are many ways to make a science book dull. I’ve read my share of popular science that included either too many equations, too much biographical detail, or otherwise dry, lifeless writing. Not so with The Clockwork Universe.

The author gets the proportion of biography, science, show more and history exactly right, giving the reader the full picture of the people and culture of the times and also the revolutionary nature of the science itself. The writing is vibrant, succinct, and conveys just the right amount of scientific detail.

What was particularly interesting to me was how much of a struggle it was for humanity to escape the grips of superstition. The most prominent figure of the scientific revolution, Isaac Newton, was a deeply superstitious and spiritual man. We know him best for proposing the laws of motion and universal gravitation in his masterpiece, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, but it came as a surprise to learn that Newton spent more time on alchemy and analyzing scripture for secret messages, than he spent on physics.

It makes you wonder what he could have accomplished had he dedicated all his time to physics or another area of science. But he was, unfortunately, in addition to being a genius, a product of his times. As John Maynard Keynes wrote, “Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.”

As a man of his times, his times were extremely superstitious. To begin with, belief in God was essentially mandatory and in large part fully rational. In fact, being an atheist in the 17th century would have been seen as irrational. We should remember that the 17th century was still 200 years before Darwin.

Without the theory of evolution, you had to believe one of two things, that either 1) humans were created or 2) humans have else always existed. Since option two was absurd, option one was taken for granted, and everyone knew that what is created requires a creator.

The idea that humans evolved from other species, to the degree that it even crossed anyone’s mind, wouldn’t have been convincing in the absence of evidence. No one knew the Earth was more than a few thousand years old, so there would not have been enough time for evolution to work even if the theory was accepted. (This is why Christopher Hitchens noted that, while Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the same day, Darwin would go on to become the greater liberator.)

And so, creation, and the belief in God, was the default position. That type of thinking led quite naturally to a host of other beliefs I would label “trickle-down superstition”, including the existence of angels, witches, demonic possessions, and divine retribution for sin in the form of natural disasters and plagues.

So the real genius of the 17th century scientists was to see beyond all of this chaos and randomness to find order in the universe according to general laws. The irony is that Newton thought he was investigating the mind of God through these natural laws, but in reality he was forming the laws that would ultimately render God unnecessary.

This caused much disagreement. Newton, for example, claimed that God actively intervened in the universe because a universe without the need of intervention would diminish God’s will, while Leibniz argued that divine intervention in the universe would diminish God’s omniscience, implying that the universe was not created in perfect order in the first place. But neither man would dare come to the conclusion that perhaps there was no God at all, or else a God that, as Spinoza would claim, was synonymous with the universe or else didn’t concern itself with human affairs.

The dispute between Newton and Leibniz would introduce a troubling paradox of God’s omnipotence. It can be phrased as a question: is God powerful enough to create a universe in which any intervention would render it less perfect? If He could, then that would preclude any intervention, and if He could not intervene, then He is not all-powerful. And if He can’t create such a universe, then He is not all-powerful to begin with. You’ll note that this is a variation of the “Can God create a stone so heavy even He can’t lift it?” paradox.

And so the concept of omnipotence itself is seen as absurd and contradictory, and the idea of an all-powerful God, to which the medieval concept of God depended, is thus refuted.

Note that, today, you can still posit the existence of a creator if you’d like, but that it is not required to explain the workings of the universe or of life. You can claim that a creator had to at least craft the laws of physics, but this introduces more questions, the main one being who created the creator. Either way, God is now a possible but not necessary hypothesis.

And therein lies the ultimate irony of the scientific revolution: the mission to comprehend the mind of God found no God to comprehend. We’ve been dealing with the repercussions, both positive and negative, ever since. show less

My favorite dinosaur was stegosaurus. I had a model stegosaurus on the shelf next to my horse models. Our son’s favorite dinosaur was T-Rex. He had a hundred model dinosaurs if he had one. At age seven, he was so well read on dinosaurs that he amazed a friend who had been on digs in Montana and had amassed an impressive fossil collection. We all thought our son would grow up to become a paleontologist.

What kid hasn’t gone through a dinosaur stage? Author Edward Dolnick had a dinosaur show more collection, and like our son, drew imagined “epics” of dinosaur battles.

Dolnick wondered what people thought when dinosaur fossils were first being discovered. His deep research is evident in this book.

Dolnick first gives readers a firm understanding of Victorian Age society, religion, and science. His writing is entertaining and the concepts easy to grasp. Then he turns to the people who discovered, and interpreted, fossils.

Dolnick begins with Mary Anning, an impoverished girl who scoured the cliffs of Lyme for fossils to sell to tourists. It was dangerous work. Mary became an expert on her finds. Sadly, as a woman with no influence or class rank, she was sidelined.

Natural History was a Victorian fad. They loved to collect everything, including plants, shells, butterflies, and fossils. Any man with a few dollars in his pocket and social rank became a fossil hunter.

Geologist William Buckland discovered Megalosaurus. He also proposed that fossilized animals were killed in the biblical flood until a find made him reject his own theory and he embraced Louis Agassiz’s theory of ice ages. It was glaciers, not floods, that had killed these animals off. Cuvier also thought that catastrophes had killed these animals.

The Victorians contorted scientific discoveries to fit into their Christian worldview. The discovery of dinosaur bones had people scrambling to conform science to faith. They imagined the fossils had been unicorns, Goliaths, and dragons. Fossils were not really old, they just looked it, “like pre-distressed jeans.” Mammoths were not a separate creature, they were just big elephants. Thomas Jefferson, who had a huge collection of fossils, was sure that the wilds of America would reveal that these animals were not extinct, but alive and still living in America. Jefferson believed that creation was a perfect machine and if one cog or link disappeared, it would all fall apart. (We were priviledged to view Jefferson’s personal collection at the Franklin Institute!)

But new discoveries challenged the old paradigm. The “possibility that a species could go extinct was to suggest that God’s creation was flawed,” that God made imperfect creatures, and that perhaps the world was not made for mankind.

These colorful characters and the rivalry between them make for great reading. Buckland was a strange gourmand, trying out every creature at the dinner table. (His guests were not always amused.) Gideon Mantell went into the field and amassed a huge fossil collection, but economics forced him to sell, while Richard Owen, who never put spade to rock to find a single fossil, claimed the spotlight as the foremost dinosaur expert. Dolnick compares Owen to Uriah Heep in appearance, and as “brilliant, backstabbing, charming and manipulative.” It was Owen who came up with the name ‘dinosaur.’

The book closes with a famous dinner in the Crystal Palace where diners sat inside a replica of a dinosaur. Those crazy Victorians.

When Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859, he started a revolution in science, proving that species did change and die off. Owen was ‘banished to history’s attic.”

It is an immensely entertaining book while also informative.

I previously read the author’s book The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book through NetGalley. show less

I really enjoyed this overview of the painful transition into the modern world Newton helped usher in with Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (great) and bitter, year-slong disputes with Leibniz, Robert Hooke, etc. (not so great). At times, the august Royal Society seems like Stupid Redneck Tricks on YouTube for their attraction to explosions and suffocations. Still, this all came together to give us calculus, Newton's Laws, the Theory of Gravity, etc. and this was good enough for show more the industrial age and getting to the moon. The author does very well to explain the technical aspects in layman's terms. show less